Lily could have done something. There was her chance. Her chance to get rid of Isabel, perhaps. If she lunged in at that moment when Isabel was off-balance…

But she didn’t. She was weak. She was cowardly. She was a speck who’d survived on virtue of being not worth killing. As usual, she just watched.

Well, she watched some of it. She covered her eyes a few times, especially when Isabel’s hands went in to grab the guts. It didn’t help. If anything it made it worse, because disembowelment smelt worse than any smell she’d ever experienced. It was better to watch, in some ways, than it was to just listen and smell.

It wasn’t really the guts that perturbed Lily. Of course, that was awful to see. But she’d seen Conrad’s body. She’d seen the corpses strewn across the island. One bit of flesh was the same as another at this stage. No, what got to her, what really made the bile rise in her throat, was how Lucilly tried to scoop the guts back in. Like it would help. It was the little things, like the blood and vomit mingling together.

Isabel was laughing. Taunting. She was happy.

How?

And amid all the disgust and horror there was… there was something else. Something that burned, something that nonetheless wasn’t rage. It was too… too similar to nausea for that.

Lucilly stopped screaming. And it was about that point that Lily identified what the feeling was.

Lily turned around and took a few steps away, hand covering her mouth. She stopped, looking at the view. At the ocean in the distance, oddly peaceful, while squelches reached her ears and the smell of copper and shit invaded her nostrils.